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Belarus religious law targets social-media use

22 November 2024

Clergy of all denominations warned to delete their social-media accounts

CLERGY of all denominations in Belarus have been warned to delete their social-media accounts, after a series of arrests were made in relation to internet posts under a new restrictive religious law.

The co-ordinator of the ecumenical group Christian Vision, Natallia Vasilevich, who is an Orthodox theologian said: “The authorities are monitoring posts going back 20 years to see if they can bring prosecutions.

“If clergy are found to have written or shared something deemed extremist, this can lead not just to their own arrest, but to de-registration of their communities.”

Ms Vasilevich spoke as priests and pastors of various denominations faced charges of distributing “extremist material” under Article 19:11 of Belarus’s Code of Administrative Offences.

Speaking to the Church Times, she said that official monitoring agencies had checked social-media records as part of an independent media purge, often keeping screenshots, and also impeded clergy from discussing “personal and confessional problems” with parishioners by checking phone messages.

In a report, Christian Vision said that 36 Roman and Greek Catholic priests had been “subjected to persecution for political reasons”, alongside 29 Protestant and 21 Orthodox clergy, since August 2020, when the contested re-election of Alexander Lukashenka for his sixth term as President was followed by harsh repression and international sanctions.

The former Soviet republic is currently home to 1298 political prisoners, according its exiled human-rights group Viasna. Among them is Ales Bialiatski, the winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize, and the Revd Henrik Akalatovich, an elderly RC parish rector who was imprisoned in November 2023 for “treason against the state”. He has since suffered a heart attack and undergone surgery for cancer.

The new law on “Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organisations”, which has been condemned by UN experts, requires all parishes to re-register by July 2025, or face liquidation (News, 8 December 2023). It prohibits religious activities deemed to infringe Belarus’s “sovereignty, constitutional system and civil harmony”.

“With all NGOs now suppressed, religious communities are the only forms of civil society still visible in Belarus. This is why they’re under so much pressure,” Ms Vasilevich said.

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